The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  In his left hand, the clerk was carrying three copies of some title, apparently moving them from one side of the store to the other.

  “Bonjour,” I tried. “I’m looking for a particular title…”

  He lowered his head, the better to see through the tangle who the intruder might be, then turned it inquisitively to one side, waiting.

  “This is the Maison Bordas?” I ventured.

  “Bonjour,” he finally responded. “Yes, it is. Are you looking for a particular title?”

  “A book called Murphy,” I said. “By Samuel Beckett.”

  His free hand quickly brushed his hair back, revealing pale blue vitreous eyes filled with surprise or consternation. “We don’t get many calls for that title,” he said.

  “But you do have it in stock?”

  He nodded. “Oh, yes,” and, setting down the three copies—which turned out to be the latest issue of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les temps modernes—he opened a door at the back of the shop and approached a ceiling-high stack of books just inside. He pulled from the corner a short stepladder, up which he clambered with surprising speed, and from the top of the pile neatly plucked a copy. Dusting it lovingly with the sleeve of his tunic, he handed it to me. “Monsieur Bordas will be pleased,” he murmured, so quietly I could barely hear him.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the three hundred francs—which in those days translated into roughly seventy-five cents—listed as the price on the cover. “Thank you,” I said, “thank you a thousand times,” for I had convinced myself that the object of my desire would not be found here.

  “C’est moi,” he said, “c’est moi qui vous remercie.” No, it’s I who thank you.

  I thought I detected a trace of emotion.

  Many years later, A. Alvarez, writing on Beckett, reported that by 1951—the year in which I made my precious acquisition—only ninety-five copies of the French edition of Murphy had been sold. I had to assume, from the surprise and barely suppressed delight of the Bordas clerk, that mine had been number ninety-six. And that out of a printing of thirty-five hundred copies five years before. What was wrong with the world?

  I took my copy home and read Murphy well into the night, lovingly slitting the pages as I went. I fell asleep and dreamed of West Brompton, where I had never been. Early next morning I repaired to St. Germain des Prés, taking the Bernard Palissy route, blowing a kiss to number 7 as I passed. For the next two hours I read—no, savored—the balance of Murphy, loving and suffering with him as he labored from mishap to mishap. Incapable of working, the ultimate degradation. Not even the love of Celia—sail y a—could move him to action, much less a job, into whose mindless maw he refused to be swallowed, Murphy stoutly—if such a term can be applied to this Irish Oblomov—defending his myriad courses of inaction. I could relate to that. Murphy had neither the polish nor the profundity of Molloy and Malone, which were transcendental, but it was still like nothing I had ever read: funny, bawdy, irreverent, skewering, self-deprecating. Smarting with language. Like difficult music heard for the first time. A bit too clever for its own good, perhaps. Joyce lurking not too far, not far enough. Erudition, obvious erudition, bursting through at times like mushrooms in the night (is it then they do it?) to intrude on the hilarious ebb and flow.

  “But betray me,” said Neary, “and you go the way of Hippasos.”

  “The Akousmatic, I presume,” said Wylie. “His retribution slips my mind.”

  Murphy, willfully inept, was one of literature’s major disasters, a man whose mind and body are so at war that he binds himself to a chair with scarves. A portrait of human loneliness. Sidesplittingly pathetic. It was a one-person ride: all the other characters were Murphy’s puppets, with little or no sign of flesh and blood. Figments of his demented mind. The asylum where he worked should have kept him and never let him go: he was more at home there than anywhere else. But then, so was I. For five or six hours, I was Murphy.

  Though not as grimly comedic, as masterfully controlled as the two later novels, it was still pure pleasure. It was a young man’s novel—Beckett, a relatively late bloomer, was roughly thirty when he wrote it, still striving to find his own voice or rid himself of influences, especially that of Joyce, omnipotent and overpowering. Recondite, full of wordplay, jam-packed with allusions and references, most of which, Dante aside, I feared I had missed but was determined to nail down sooner or later. Despite those reservations, Murphy only confirmed for me what I already felt: Samuel Beckett was the most exciting writer I had read since I’d come to Paris. Since Joyce, certainly. But why was he so little known? I glanced at the copyright page: first published by Routledge in 1938. French edition 1947. My God! Thirteen years ago! And the translation coming up to five. Beckett had been born in 1906, his bio notes had told me, which meant he had just turned forty-five. Forty-five, for God’s sake, and nobody was reading him!

  * * *

  For the past year, I had buttonholed friends and acquaintances, mostly French, about Beckett, not so much to proselytize, though that was part of it, as in the vain hope that something more he had written might turn up. There is a point in persistent pursuit, even of lost causes, for one night over dinner at the Dôme—a radical change of locale, but many of my French friends preferred Montparnasse to St. Germain—a young French writer, Daniel Mauroc, also published by Minuit, expressed surprise that I had not read the stories.

  What stories? I wanted to know.

  “I know of at least two,” he said, “one published in Les temps modernes, the other in Fontaine. One is called ‘Suite,’ the other ‘L’expulsé,’ I believe.”

  “Continued” and “The Expelled.” I especially liked the sound of the first, for it promised more to come. That surmise proved correct, though not quite as I had suspected. I went by the office of Les temps modernes and asked if they had any copies left of the issue containing “Suite.” Checking the contents of an oversized ledger, the young woman started her backward pursuit in time, her dainty forefinger scrolling slowly down page after page. She licked her forefinger each time she turned the page, a gesture slightly lubricious, at least in the first sense of the term, hopefully the third. When she reached 1948 with no luck, she glanced up, removing her oversized horn-rimmed glasses to reveal a pair of azure eyes that might have tempted even Murphy to cast off his seven scarves and charge from his hideaway in search of gainful employment, for the face in which those soulful eyes were embedded was a Botticelli at the very least. Rising. I could feel myself falling hopelessly in love in that grim, Marxist-spare office.

  “No luck,” she said, shaking her pretty head. “Unless you know the year.”

  I remembered Mauroc saying it was shortly after the war. “Nineteen forty-six?” I ventured. “Maybe forty-seven?”

  She fluttered the pages further backward in time, perused each carefully, with a patience I thought was rare, for the Gallic mind is as swift as it is dismissive, till a slow smile broke like early sunlight over her face. A look of triumphant gravity. Archimedes in his bath. “Here it is,” she said. “You were right. July 1946 issue.” She pushed back her chair, rose, and headed for a back room. Five years ago. Could there be any copies left?

  Within minutes she was back carrying a pristine copy. I thanked her a thousand times (in French), counted out the money, gazed at her steadfastly, and asked if, to thank her more concretely, I might ask her out for a drink.

  “That would be lovely,” she said, and my heart leaped. We agreed to meet the following afternoon at six at the Flore, Sartre’s hangout. It seemed appropriate.

  “What is this ‘Suite’ you are looking for in that issue?” she asked.

  “A story by Samuel Beckett,” I said.

  “Never heard of him,” she said. “That’s a strange name. Is he French?”

  “No, Irish.”

  “Ah,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  “May I ask you your name?” I said.

  “Cecile,” she said. Another coincide
nce. My Celia. My soon-to-be Celia.

  “And my name’s Richard,” I said, “though most people call me Dick.”

  “Ah,” she said, “Deek. In France, you know, that’s mostly a name they give to dogs.”

  For a fleeting moment I considered canceling the morrow’s drink but thought better of it.

  “Suite” was a marvel, on a par with Molloy and Malone. Like the later novels, it was reality stripped bare of inessentials. A desolate song, mournful yet stunning, its protagonist bent but unbowed—or, rather, bent only by the ultimate knowledge that springs from being born. “Don’t pity me,” he seemed to be saying, “I am beyond pity.” Maybe yes, maybe no. Still, the story felt strangely incomplete. With Beckett, I reasoned, his ideas of complete or incomplete doubtless had little to do with those with which I had been inculcated. It was only later that I learned, from Beckett himself, that my surmise had not been amiss: “Suite” represented only the first half of a novella. In sending it to Les temps modernes, Beckett assumed, rightly or wrongly, that at some later date, hopefully the next issue, the magazine would publish the second half. But when he sent the second half, Sartre’s co-editor Simone de Beauvoir returned it with a note indicating that it was not the magazine’s policy to publish sequels. Didn’t the title clearly imply there was more to come, for God’s sake? She, or Sartre, had presumably thought that what Beckett had sent them in the first place was the complete work. Or perhaps they thought Beckett was putting them on, testing whether they could distinguish a part from a whole. In any event, the incident angered Beckett—a man very slow to anger. With some reluctance but obvious emotion, he sent de Beauvoir an imploring letter, saying that the magazine’s rejection “was the stuff of nightmares,” for by not publishing the entire story, she was mutilating his work, “cutting me off before my voice has time to mean something.” Petulance? It may have appeared so to Sartre and de Beauvoir at the time, but in the light of the total integrity for which Beckett would later become legendary, and the brilliance of the story itself when read as a whole, his distress certainly seems justified. In all fairness to Sartre and de Beauvoir, Beckett’s go-between, Tony Clerx, had failed to mention to the two editors that “Suite” was only the first part of the story. In any event, perhaps to make amends, Les temps modernes had published in their November 1946 issue a dozen of Beckett’s poems in French. Still, I’m not sure he ever forgave them for what he deemed their literary myopia.

  Finding a copy of “L’expulsé” was much easier. This time I knew the date, 1947, and the austere clerk who took my request was back in under two minutes with the issue, no questions asked, cash on the barrelhead, au revoir et merci.

  The results of the second search were even more rewarding than the first, for “The Expelled,” aside from not being truncated, was, to my mind, even better. To weep over, it was so poignant; to laugh over, it was so darkly hilarious. The protagonist was here again a Thomas doubting not of his Lord or master but of himself, groping to make sense of the world, of the meanest of acts, the most basic of situations, in the instance trying to cope with the fact of being literally thrown out, expelled from wherever he had been living—his asylum, his hospice—by focusing on, calculating in his mind, how many steps down “they” had thrown him:

  There were not many steps. I had counted them a thousand times, both going up and coming down, but the figure has gone from my mind. I have never known whether you should say one with your foot on the sidewalk, two with the following foot on the first step, and so on, or whether the sidewalk shouldn’t count. At the top of the steps I fell foul of the same dilemma. In the other direction, I mean from top to bottom, it was the same, the word is not too strong. I did not know where to begin nor where to end, that’s the truth of the matter.

  The body battered and beleaguered. The narrator humiliated and bereft, but the rational mind still works, still theorizes in absurd wonderment.

  Both stories just as brilliant as Molloy and Malone.

  * * *

  Having read and reread both stories, like a druggie I needed a further Beckett fix, but none was to be found. Then, as often happens in life, enter serendipity. A few years before, I had met an aspiring young dark-haired, fine-featured Garbo-look-alike budding actress, Delphine Seyrig, as bright as she was young. She was a drama student and also a close friend of the famed actor and avant-garde director Roger Blin, who would probably be directing a Beckett play early next year, she said, either a long play entitled Eleuthéria or the shorter one Waiting for Godot, a portion of which we had heard together the year before at the French radio’s Club d’Essai. More likely the latter play, she said, because it had fewer actors and would be far less expensive to produce. And money for plays, like money for magazines, was hard to come by in those days. (In those days?)

  Delphine was an unexpected benefit of my stint at Le Collège Cévenol, a secondary school in the Cévennes Mountains where I had spent my first summer in France as a work camper. She had been a student there, and our paths had crossed briefly: as the work campers arrived, the students were packing to leave. Frank Manchon, member of the Collège Cévenol, and in charge of welcoming American students, who had greeted me upon my arrival in Paris, had given me her name, and a day or two before she departed for Paris, I had made a point of introducing myself. To my great surprise, she spoke perfect English, or rather American, and my first reaction was that I had been led to the wrong young lady, for I knew at the school there were a few English and Americans. But, no, it was indeed Delphine. Her father, a leading archaeologist, had gone to New York as the French cultural attaché of the Free French government during the war, and she had spent several formative years in middle school there. Her heart was set on the theater. Despite her tender age—she was fifteen or sixteen at the time—with her deep, melodious voice, and with her ravishing good looks, she would, I was certain, make her mark. Back in Paris I saw her little, for she ultimately did continue her studies, not at Collège Cévenol in Chambon, but at a Paris lycée. But the minute she had her bac, she began her theater studies at one of the leading drama schools, at which point fate brought us again into contact. The intervening three years had only added to her beauty, and that very special voice had either matured on its own or been enriched by her lessons. An avid theatergoer, she invited me to join her every week or two, never allowing me to pay for her ticket no matter how greatly I insisted, though she let me invite her to an occasional dinner before or after the theater. Through her, I had seen more plays than I had during my previous years in Paris, some of little interest (to me, not to her, for whom every work was fascinating, if not for its inherent worth, then for the direction, the settings, the costumes, the technique of one or more of the actors or actresses), but several utterly compelling: Eugène Ionesco’s Les chaises, La leçon, and La cantatrice chauve; Arthur Adamov’s La grande et la petite manoeuvre; August Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata, which Blin directed at the Gaîté-Montparnasse; Jean Anouilh’s La valse des toréadors and L’alouette. I was fascinated—“mesmerized” would be a fairer term—by Delphine, tempted as well, but I confess, too, that Delphine irritated me a tad. More than once, when I was enjoined to pick her up either at school or, more often, at the nearby Luxembourg Gardens, she was surrounded by a gaggle of fellow drama students, all of whom looked to be twelve and seemed bent on out-gesticulating one another, as if already in performance. Delphine—already an actress on- and offstage—would acknowledge my presence, smile, and turn back to the young yakking colleagues, to finish her nontext. I would tap my watch to remind her that a curtain lay ahead if she was still interested, and finally she would break away with a smile that won her instant forgiveness.

  It was Delphine who, as noted, had roughly a year before provided me with the latest and most intriguing clue to the Beckett enigma. One night on our way to the theater she casually mentioned that the French radio was going to record and broadcast part of Godot in a couple weeks. “Would you like to go to the recording session?” she sa
id. “Roger told me that Monsieur Beckett will doubtless be there.”

  A chance to meet the man. “Of course,” I said, “just tell me when and where.”

  “We’ll go together,” she said. “Pick me up at my mother’s on the rue Vaneau.”

  Promptly at two, I rang her doorbell; the broadcast, which was close by in a Left Bank studio, Le Club d’Essai de la Radio, was scheduled for 3:15. On our way over, I asked Delphine if she had read the play or knew anything about it. She shook her head. “All I know is that Roger thinks it’s wonderful. Different. Like nothing he’s ever directed.”

  “Having read Beckett’s fiction,” I said, “I’m having trouble trying to imagine what one of his plays might be like.”

  When we arrived, there were at least two or three dozen people in the studio, including the actors. Technicians were scurrying to and fro, pulling on electric cords, checking mikes, studying boards. I recognized Blin, whom I had seen in two or three plays, but none of the other three actors, who were huddled in one corner, script in hand. I looked carefully from face to face, but at least at this juncture no sign of the author. Delphine introduced me to Blin, who stood politely, shook my hand, and smiled, obviously having other matters on his mind.

  “Will Monsieur Beckett be coming?” Delphine asked.

  “In principle,” Blin said. “But who knows? He’s shy to a fault. Still, he said he was anxious to hear this.”

  I thought Blin was being more than polite, solicitous, to a very young lady, his student, at a time when he should have been communing with himself minutes before a performance. I later learned, however, that Miss Seyrig was more involved in the Blin production than she let on. She had recently received a small sum of money from an uncle, the purpose of which he had stipulated was for travel and to broaden her young horizons. But when she heard what a hard time Blin was having raising the money for a production, hopefully next year, she donated the entire sum to the cause. Had she consulted with her uncle, I asked her, before turning her travel money into a theatrical donation?